Posted!

Join the Conversation

Comments

Welcome to our new and improved comments, which are for subscribers only.
This is a test to see whether we can improve the experience for you.
You do not need a Facebook profile to participate.

You will need to register before adding a comment.
Typed comments will be lost if you are not logged in.

Please be polite.
It's OK to disagree with someone's ideas, but personal attacks, insults, threats, hate speech, advocating violence and other violations can result in a ban.
If you see comments in violation of our community guidelines, please report them.

OPINION

Liberals have Obama to thank for the tea party

Leave it to a flaming liberal like Brandt Ayers, publisher of the Anniston Star, to tell us how Republican President Teddy Roosevelt would behave were he to suddenly spring back to life, with all his youthful vigor.

Yes, Teddy Roosevelt was heralded as the trust buster as he worked to break up the huge corporations of his era that were forming around the burgeoning railroad, banking and other industries riding the crest of the Industrial Revolution and the incredible economic expansion of the U.S.

But Ayers' idea that Teddy would ride into Washington, D.C., and start tossing fellow Republicans (tea partiers) out of their congressional office windows is absurd. Teddy would more likely march his Rough Riders down Pennsylvania Avenue, turn into the White House and place President Obama under house arrest for unilaterally damaging the foundation of the nation both men were elected to uphold.

The creation of the tea party, which Ayers rails against in his screed, is a construct of his most favorite president, Barack Obama.

Liberals love to disparage the mostly average Americans who formed the tea party movement out of a fear that the current occupant of the Oval Office is systematically destroying the America they all know and love. And it is decidedly not an 18th century construct, as Mr. Ayers alleges, but the same America that was in place when Obama first took the oath of office as president in 2009.

Americans have a right to be frightened of a president who says quite openly that if he can't get the U.S. Congress to pass his programs, he'll just use his pen to write new law via executive order.

Obama was appropriately smacked down June 26 by the U.S. Supreme Court for making the unconstitutional appointment of members of the National Labor Relations Board while the Senate was in session. Obama made the appointments because he did not like the makeup of that board (it was not a rubber stamp) so he used the excuse that since the senators were not physically in their seats, he would recast the board to his liking. The Supreme Court said no.

But this behavior is merely the tip of the iceberg. After forcing Obamacare legislation through a reluctant Congress with nary a Republican vote, Obama proceeded to violate his own law — a law so convoluted that even the liberal queen of the House, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, famously asked her colleagues to pass it in order to learn what is in it.

The plain facts are these: Obama created the tea party movement with his habitual overreaching and lawlessness. He ought to be proud of that because it has energized millions of Americans, many of whom had hit the political opt-out button. Their re-engagement is a healthy thing for America that should be celebrated.

There isn't much room for error when a nation allows a chief executive, in a three-branch governmental system, to ignore the other branches and do as he pleases. If the elections this year give control of the Senate to the Republicans, that may be enough to stem the flow of our liberties at the hands of a man hell-bent on having his way, the Constitution and our laws be damned.

Obama rode into Washington on the twin horses of hope and change. Those same mounts will suffice to ride him back out and home to Chicago, where he can write his memoir of how he tried to reconstruct an America more to his liking, but slipped on a pile of tea leaves.